How much did Make America Great Again, Inc. spend on advertising during the 2024 election cycle and who were the vendors?

1. Total outside/ad spending — the headline figure

OpenSecrets’ summary of MAGA Inc. lists the group’s outside spending in the 2024 cycle at $376,948,611, a number that is the clearest single-cycle total available in the provided material and is used as the baseline figure for outside advertising and advocacy spending ^[1]. InfluenceWatch independently reports a nearly identical overall spend figure and emphasizes that the vast majority of that outlay was channeled into media — 91.81 percent — which InfluenceWatch quantifies as $349,927,765 ^[2].

2. Media vs. other categories — how the money was allocated

The reporting distinguishes media buys from other expenditures: InfluenceWatch breaks out roughly $15.25 million for campaign expenses and $10.22 million for strategy and research, with the remainder concentrated in media-related activity ^[2]. OpenSecrets’ categorizations likewise place advertising and media production in a specific “media” bucket (covering TV, radio, print and internet buys), which is how researchers and reporters attribute most outside spending to advertising rather than administrative or research line-items ^[5].

3. Where the money came from — big donors, concentrated funding

The funding that enabled this advertising surge was highly concentrated: public reporting points to Timothy Mellon’s multi‑million dollar gifts as among the largest single contributions to MAGA Inc. in 2024, and OpenSecrets records show the super PAC raised roughly $410.5 million across the 2023–2024 cycle, numbers that underscore how a small number of large donors can bankroll massive ad campaigns ^{[3] [6]}. Independent coverage and cycle trackers also flagged MAGA Inc. as a principal Trump-aligned super PAC whose donors and receipts made it one of the dominant outside spenders of the cycle ^{[2] [1]}.

4. Vendors — what the record shows and what it doesn’t

Despite robust totals, the sources provided do not publish a line-by-line list of ad vendors, media-buy firms, creative houses or specific platform vendors retained by MAGA Inc.; OpenSecrets’ outside spending pages and the FEC detail totals and categories but, in these snippets, do not disclose an exhaustive vendor roster ^{[5] [4]}. Federal reporting regimes require disclosure of amounts and sometimes payees, but platform-level ad reporting and voluntary platform disclosures remain incomplete, and the Brennan Center and Wesleyan Media Project have documented gaps and inconsistent platform data that make vendor-level accounting difficult to reconstruct from public ad libraries alone ^{[7] [8]}.

5. Interpretation, alternative views and implications

Taken together, the data show a near‑$377 million outside spend for MAGA Inc. in 2024 with roughly $350 million tied to media buys — a scale that shaped a national ad landscape and mirrored broader patterns of record-breaking outside spending documented by OpenSecrets and others ^{[1] [2] [9]}. Critics argue that this concentration of donor power and the opacity around exact vendor relationships illustrate regulatory and transparency shortfalls; defenders counter that super PACs are legally permitted to marshal independent resources and that public disclosure of totals — if not every vendor detail — exists in FEC and watchdog reporting ^{[3] [4]}. The supplied sources corroborate the magnitude of the spend and its media focus while also revealing the practical limits of public vendor-level disclosure in the 2024 cycle ^{[2] [7]}.